The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it: "As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that

Comments:Hayward believes that when the whip comes down in the real world, those vulnerable soft-minded snowflakes who never learned to engage us in civilized debate will be at a terrible disadvantage. It´s no accident that the Left´s most recent category of the helpless in need of help is the stupid: their natural constituents. Candlepower envy, ha!

The hacktivist collective Anonymous is planning a "Denouncement Day" this Friday to "denounce the Confederacy, to denounce racism, bigotry and hate," saying "it is time to take down these monuments of hate ourselves." Supporters plan to gather at 6 p.m. EST at the statue of Rear Adm. Raphael Semmes in Mobile, Ala., the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Little Rock, the Jackson Guards Memorial in Jacksonport, Ark., the Searcy Confederate Memorial in Searcy, Ark., the Our Confederate Dead monument in Munn Park in Lakeland, Fla., the Confederate Monument in Piedmont Park in Atlanta (which was defaced with spray paint this week), the

TAMPA — As gruesome images of burned bodies flashed across the screen, Amber Perera put her head down on the desk and cried. Last week, authorities say, the 29-year-old Brandon woman caused a chain reaction crash on the Leroy Selmon Expressway that caused a Hyundai sedan to burst into flames, killing a couple and their young daughter. Now, in Hillsborough County courtroom, Perera was getting her first look at the aftermath. Her attorney argued at Wednesday´s bail hearing that Perera had daily seizures and experienced one right before the crash, causing her to lose control. Prosecutors say she was under the influence

Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt are heading to the Middle East for yet another go at Israeli-Palestinian peace. Yawning already, dear reader? Well, we all know why. They have a chance in you-know-where of succeeding. Nothing against Messrs. Kushner and Greenblatt, but this roundelay has been going on numerous times since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Discussions are held between the two sides (directly or indirectly), the Israelis asked for good faith concessions, the Palestinians asked to refrain from violence. Actual substantive negotiations (occasionally) occur. (Everyone has known the parameters of a successful negotiation for years.) At the last minute the Palestinians walk

Southern slaveholders were rapists. We know this because only 73% of the DNA of African-Americans is African; the rest is Caucasian with a small fraction of Native American. Most of the admixture of DNA, a McGill University study concludes, occurred before the Civil War, that is, when slaveholders and their white employees could use female slaves at will. Keep that in mind the next time Foghorn Leghorn sounds off about the honor of Southern womanhood. To own slaves is wicked; to rape female slaves and sell one´s children by them is disgusting in the extreme. Yet that is what the

A male stripper from Tampa is accused of stabbing his partner multiple times in the eyes with a pen after he suspected he was a cannibal, according to WTVJ and a report acquired by the station. Justin Calhoun, 24, is being held without bond on an attempted second-degree murder charge after he attacked Mark Brann, 67, in his Key West home, the report stated. Calhoun told police that he and Brann were in a relationship and that the incident started because Calhoun suspected Brann of being a cannibal. The two then got into an argument and Brann picked up a gun, according

Dr. Judith Curry is one of the leading realist voices in the climate science community, even though she has now moved on from what she considers a hopelessly politicized field. This 12-minute interview is a good introduction to some (by no means all) of the reasons why global warming alarmism is wrong, and why politics has badly compromised, if not completely ruined, a nascent scientific discipline. Again, this is an introduction, not a master class, but it is well worth your time: Notable quote: "On balance, I don’t see any particular dangers from greenhouse warming. [Humans do] influence climate to some

Behind hue and cry over the alt-right/ctrl-left clashes lurks the big stakes game for control of the state. Past tyranny operated through control of the state, via organs of censorship, surveillance, the criminal justice system and propaganda. Without these it is merely an impotent spirit of malice, condemned to haunt little bookstores and beer gardens. Neither Nazism nor Bolshevism was possible with a small state. From the Third Reich to Maduro´s Venezuela amts, diensts and bureaus have been the true foot inside the boot in the human face. Without Deep State actors ready to exploit it the Reichstag Fire would

Being a Jewish fella, I don´t hold much brief for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But until this Saturday, I hadn´t seen a lot of them around lately. And I´ve been going about the country quite a bit for the last couple of years, hitting roughly half the states, including some like Mississippi where the Klan was once riding high. I´m happy to report that on my visit to the black-owned Two Sister´s Kitchen in the capital of that state, Jackson, blacks and whites were both equally, and contentedly in my eyes, braving the criticism of their cardiologists for what is reputed

Donald J Trump is president. Really. He won it fair and square, he was inaugurated seven -- almost eight -- months ago, and he very probably is going to be president for another three and a half years. Minimum. So, now, children, let´s calm down. All of you people over there saying Trump is unqualified and should be removed? Give it up. He´s qualified by the only qualification that matters: he is over 35, he is a native U.S. citizen, and he won the damned election. The Constitution doesn´t have a clause in it for removal by vote of the

As Joel Pollak reports in Breitbart this morning, Rolling Stone magazine has refried and repackaged the whole range of lies--comprehensively refuted--against White House adviser Sebastian Gorka. The left-wing media keeps setting a new bar for chutzpah. Central to the Stone story is an attempt to tar Dr. Gorka with guilt by association with right-wing political parties in Hungary, where he was active between 2000 and 2008. "Gorka served as adviser to [Hungary´s prime minister Viktor] Orbán," the article states, "who´s been called a ´neo-fascist dictator´ by Sen. John McCain." As it happens, the left-wing Jewish news site The Forward offered this

The riots in Charlottesville reflect the breakdown of the Narrative, which has been the subject of several past posts. What happened on the street has been a long time coming on the Internet. The bonds of trust are breaking down. Reputation and authority are no longer recognized outside of a membership group. The personal, already political, finally become commercial. Some companies have flatly refused to serve those whose views they disapprove of. Political views are becoming conditions of employment. Some national political leaders are proposing explicit "litmus tests" to sort people according to virtue. Now cars are ramming into people. The riots

The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it: "As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that

Fox News´s Kat Timpf slammed President Trump on Tuesday for his "disgusting" press conference in which he again blamed "both sides" for the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, stepping back from his direct condemnation of white supremacist groups a day earlier. "It was one of the biggest messes I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened," said Timpf, a co-host of “The Fox News Specialists.” “It is honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I am wondering if it was actually real life —

Evidence is turning up from, of all places, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as Breitbart and others, that this character, Jason Kessler, who organized the suspicious and supposed Alt-Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. that blew up in everyone´s face, is a cunning lefty holdover from the Occupy Wall Street movement and a former Barack Obama supporter. I smell Soros money, sabotage, and Democrat dirty tricks here. I´ve been suspicious of the nature of the violence at this supposed Alt-Right demonstration since the news first began breaking. It is no secret that radical elements in the Democrat left have

A crowd of ignorant protesters pulled down a bronze Confederate statue that stood before a county government building in Durham, North Carolina — the angry national backlash to the Charlottesville brouhaha over the Robert E. Lee monument. This is not how civil societies operate. And yet this is what the left has brought, and now cheers. What’s next — burning books with offensive content? Burning books written by those who used to own slaves? At the very least, museums will have to go. The problem with revising history based on a standard of “feeling offensive” — as this anti-Confederate craze is rooted — is that someone,

President Trump should have left well enough alone. His Monday denunciation of costumed sheet-wearers and Nazi wanna-bes could have cleared the way for Americans of all stripes to focus their outrage on things that matter more than presidential words. That would be the violence that is infecting our politics and the frightening acceptance of it as the new normal. But Trump’s defiance yesterday is sure to keep the media pot boiling over his rhetoric instead of an ominous reality. Namely, that real protestors don’t carry baseball bats, crowbars and mace. Yet Saturday’s bloody clash in Charlottesville showed that many on

Former presidential candidate and current Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be moving closer to mounting a primary challenge against President Trump in the 2020 election. Sources close to Kasich told Willie Geist of the "Today Show" there is growing a sense of "moral imperative" to run against Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020 following his controversial statements on the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Va. (Tweet) Kasich has long been critical of Trump. On Tuesday, Kasich criticized Trump´s Charlottesville comments, saying "there is no moral equivalency to Nazi sympathizers" following Trump´s tumultuous press conference. Kasich, who lost to Trump

Trump ignited a political firestorm yesterday during an impromptu press conference in which he said there was "blame on both sides" for the tragic events that occurred in Charlottesville over the weekend. Now, the discovery of a craigslist ad posted last Monday, almost a full week before the Charlottesville protests, is raising new questions over whether paid protesters were sourced by a Los Angeles based "public relations firm specializing in innovative events" to serve as agitators in counterprotests. The ad was posted by a company called "Crowds on Demand" and offered $25 per hour to "actors and photographers"

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said Thursday there would be questions if the Barcelona terror attack involving a van crashing into a group of people was a "copycat" of what happened in Charlottesville, Va. At least 13 people were killed and more than 50 were injured in Barcelona on Thursday when men rammed their van into a crowd of pedestrians at Las Ramblas, a popular tourism area in the city in northeastern Spain. The attack came five days after a man with white supremacist group ties was arrested for driving his car into a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing one

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in on the weekend´s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, castigating Donald Trump without naming him. ´We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis,´ McConnell said in a statement. The choice of words, while careful, appeared to push back against Trump´s claim on Tuesday that some ´very fine people´ were among a crowd of white supremacists who rallied in the college town. McConnell´s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, stood next to Trump on Tuesday as he insisted both sides of the weekend´s clash bore some responsibility for

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned President Trump on Wednesday that his “words are dividing Americans, not healing them” in the wake of the bloody clashes in Virginia that has sparked a national conversation about white supremacists and race. Mr. Graham also vowed that Republicans will “fight back against the idea that the party of Lincoln has a welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world.” “Through his statements yesterday, President Trump took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like

As James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger famously observed, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.” On Tuesday evening, three prominent Republicans — Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney — endorsed the left-wing media’s preferred narrative and embraced the masked thugs of Antifa as heroes. McCain and Romney used almost identical language, bending their knees to the media narrative that only two factions were present in Charlottesville during the awful events of last weekend: white supremacist Nazis and “Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.”

In the midst of the maelstrom of breaking news of the past several days, the outlines of a big story affecting the future of the Fox News Channel are beginning to emerge. They involve a major makeover of Fox News´s ailing prime-time schedule and a rising new star, Eboni K. Williams. After the dust settles, Williams, whose current show, The Fox News Specialists, looks as though it´s headed for oblivion after the coming shake-up, may wind up on the fast track to cable news stardom.On Monday, August 14, Matt Drudge let the cat out of the bag, as he occasionally

NEW YORK- They wash their hands of neo-Nazis and wag their fingers at leftists. They denounce a press corps they see as biased and controversies they view as manufactured. But in the frenzied blame game over the deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists, Donald Trump´s loyal base is happy to absolve the president himself. Even as Trump´s zig-zag response to the weekend bloodshed in Charlottesville, Virginia, has brought criticism from some Republican lawmakers, many men and women who helped put him in office remain unmoved by the latest uproar. "He has done nothing to turn me away from